


Faint of Heart

by boltlightning



Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Game(s), Recovery, appearance by the mystery wing, pseudo-established relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:13:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24842842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boltlightning/pseuds/boltlightning
Summary: Cloud returns from war.(Or: The end of Cloud's KH subplot we never received.)
Relationships: Aerith Gainsborough/Cloud Strife
Comments: 3
Kudos: 54





	Faint of Heart

The sky blinks, and from a burst of light emerges Cloud. He lands shakily on his feet, then drops to his knees, his sword clattering beside him.

Every evening for _months_ Aerith had waited on this precipice of Hollow Bastion for Cloud's return. He had vanished in a battle with Sephiroth without so much as a goodbye, and has finally, finally returned. Yet Aerith still feels a jolt of surprise when he drops from the sky.

It is fitting — Cloud is always coming and going, without warning, for better or for worse. 

After a brief moment of hesitation, Aerith scrambles to kneel by Cloud's side, assessing the severity of his injuries at a glance. He is alive and lucid, but he is hurt. Most damning of all, his _wing_ is on his back — the black demon wing, a remnant of Sephiroth’s dark influence. She had seen him use it in active battle before, but never in peacetime. Cloud keeps it folded tightly against his back, and Aerith does not mention it.

“Aerith,” he rasps, his breathing harsh. “I came back.”

Her heart leaps into her throat. “You came back,” she repeats numbly.

With some effort, she pulls his arm over her shoulders, grabs the back of his belt with her free hand, and tugs them both to their feet. Cloud is trembling, but whether from pain or exhaustion she does not know. He leans on Aerith for strength as they begin their trek back to Radiant Garden from the outskirts. Steadying herself, Aerith casts curative magic over him, the potency multiplied by their closeness. The flowers and vines of magic bloom and dissipate around them both.

“Thank you,” Cloud mumbles.

Aerith pauses to take a deep breath. Cloud is _heavy_ , but at least he has manners. “Of course. I’m just glad you still have some fight left in you, Cloud. I'll send Leon after your sword.”

“No, I mean _thank you_ , Aerith,” he insists. Usually so taciturn, Cloud’s tone is bright and earnest. It is clear he has thought long about this moment, and he still seems to have trouble putting the words together. “You always believed in me, even when you had no reason to. I don’t think I would have...I mean, I couldn’t have—”

“Cloud,” she interrupts. His breathing has grown shorter and more erratic over the journey, and he is hot to the touch; something more is wrong with him than just his bodily wounds. “Please, save your energy. Not that I don’t like hearing you admit that I was right.”

Cloud snorts. Aerith feels a small surge of relief; this ordeal had not totally crushed his sense of rapport. “You always are.”

They make it to Aerith's apartment in the borough. He does not object when she deposits him on her bed and demands he take off his shirt. Aerith checks him over with the deftness of a trained physician, hard won from years of attending to the Restoration Committee’s injuries. Any of his physical wounds had been closed by her magic and on their way to being scars: some are scabbed and radiate an angry heat, and some are already sealed up tight. One stab wound in particular between his ribs worries her, but she will keep an eye on it. The coldness in his extremities and the clammy skin are telltale signs of mana exhaustion. They do not explain the slight tremor in his hands, nor the unnatural body heat.

Her fingers brush his wing when she assesses his back. The skin is leathery and taut, warm to the touch. Cloud flinches and curls the appendage tighter against himself as though he had been struck.

“Please,” he says thinly. “Not the wing.”

It is such a painful reaction that Aerith does not push him more. She has so many questions for him, all gathered at the tip of her tongue like a waterfall cresting a cliff — but they are for another day, when he is well and she is rested. Aerith gets him a clean shirt and tells him to sleep it off; she’ll check on him when he wakes.

But Cloud doesn’t wake the next morning, or even the following evening. When Aerith presses a hand to his forehead, he is burning up. He sleeps on his back, the wing spread out next to him. One hand rests on his chest and clutches at his shirt as he dreams restless, upsetting dreams. 

The rest of the Committee’s concern bleeds through Radiant Garden; they look to Aerith expectantly for information, and offer their help readily whenever she needs it. Yuffie hovers by her door for updates until she is shooed away. In her anxiousness, Aerith makes Cloud a bouquet of flowers from her garden. She makes a second, in case the first one wilts, then forces herself to leave the garden before she picks it barren.

Finally, a full day and two nights after his return, Aerith shakes him awake. Bleary-eyed, he rouses and looks to her, forcing himself onto his elbows.

“Aerith?” he asks, dazed. “Are you okay?”

She smiles in spite of herself, and reaches forward to brush his bangs from his eyes. “I’m fine,” she says softly. “How do you feel?”

“I’ve been better,” he admits, his voice flat. “How long have I been…?”

He drifts off, and looks out the window at the rising sun. He had returned during sunset his first day, and Aerith can see him doing the mental math. “Too long,” she answers. “Can you eat?”

Cloud manages to extract himself from the blankets and pull himself into a sitting position, legs crossed, wing tight against his back. Aerith brings a bowl of stew for each of them and sits across from him on the bed, watching him carefully. He seems to show some signs of improvement — the tremor in his hands has subsided enough to allow him to wolf down his stew like an animal starved.

Aerith pushes her own meal around her bowl, rolling the question around in her head. She does not want him to shut down, nor relive the traumatic experience he _just_ emerged from...but the wing looms over them, even curled up as tight as it is. “Cloud,” she starts haltingly. “What...what happened?”

“Good question.” he puts his bowl (already empty) on the nightstand and holds her gaze evenly as he mulls over his words. With a sharp inhale, he says finally, “I fought Sephiroth. We were in a different world, one I didn’t recognize. And I think I...died. O-or came close, anyway.”

Whatever Aerith expected, it was not that. She reels, her breath suddenly short and chest tight. Aerith had always been able to feel where Cloud was using the bond between their hearts; she could feel him in Olympus Coliseum even when they were a universe apart. But when he and Sephiroth disappeared to fight their war, Tifa and Sora witnessed them disappearing in a flash of light, and Aerith had lost that connection. The faint pressure at the edge of her heart, the link that had reassured him he was alive all that time — gone. She had lost track of him for the first time in a decade.

 _Cloud could have died,_ she thinks numbly, _and I wouldn't have known._

“Aerith?”

Concerned, he leans forward, but hesitates before reaching a hand forward. Aerith shakes the fog from her head and gives him what she hopes is a reassuring smile.

“I’m fine. That’s just...quite the revelation to drop on someone.”

Guilt flickers through his eyes. “Yeah.”

“Rest,” she orders gently. “Rest is often the best cure.” She braces a hand against his shoulder and feels the fever rolling through him; her hands must be ice against his bare skin. If he feels discomfort, he says nothing, but his focus is quickly fading. Cloud nods like a child being ordered to bed, and falls back into his strange, ill sleep within moments.

Cloud had never been a particularly outgoing person. He was reserved and thoughtful as a child, and even after the darkness stripped away his boyish reticence, he had kept to himself. But to see the intelligent spark in his eyes dull from this inexplicable sickness is something else entirely. 

Aerith takes a moment to breathe deeply and think through the situation before she reports to Leon and the Committee. Whatever Sephiroth had done to Cloud is unlike any poison or disease Aerith had seen in all her years of training. Cloud had maybe died in this mystical battle, yet he is here and very much alive, and his affliction does not seem fatal. There is no way of knowing for sure. She repeats his symptoms to herself like they are pieces of a puzzle: unusual fatigue, an unbreaking fever, a tremor in the hands. A dark wing, tangible and real, a painful reminder of long-fought battles both internal and external.

Aerith cannot think of a logical solution. She looks again to his sleeping form; Cloud’s brow twitches with discomfort even in the shallows of his sleep.

“Rest is often the best cure,” she repeats aloud to the quiet room. It is more for her benefit than his, to hear the words in her ears and convince herself it is true. She parts the window curtain, opens the window to the cool morning, and leaves Cloud to his rest. 

* * *

After the third day of Cloud’s stupor, Leon calls an emergency meeting. The Restoration Committee gathers in Merlin’s house.

“Are we sure it’s not just some terrible flu?” Yuffie asks, her arms crossed on the table in front of her. “You guys remember the last time _I_ had the flu, right?”

Leon grimaces at the memory, and Aerith puts a sympathetic hand on her shoulder.

“Seems like Cloud’s blowin’ less chunks, though,” Cid offers helpfully. He plucks the toothpick from his mouth and frowns thoughtfully, propping his feet up at the console of his terminal. “Is it some kinda infection?”

Next to him, Merlin consults no less than three huge tomes on the human body, floating around his head as he flips through the pages. He shakes his head at Cid’s comment and says, “His wounds are all closed and cleaned, are they not? No, no, this seems to go deeper…”

And he returns to flipping through his pages. Cid throws him a dark look and grunts.

“I’m no medic,” he grumbles, “and neither are you.”

An uncomfortable silence settles over the room, only stirred by Merlin’s pursuit through his books. Finally, Leon offers, “It does remind me of something. Sora.”

“Really? What about Cloud reminds you of _Sora_?” Yuffie scoffs. “Besides their chocobo-ass hair.”

Cid snorts at the jab, and Aerith grins dryly. Their leader, as usual, patiently ignores it. 

“Do you remember when he first transformed into…” Leon grasps for the word. “His dark form. Anti-Form, right?”

“Oh!” Aerith puts her hand to her mouth. “Yes, I do. When he changed back, he was dead to the world, and Donald and Goofy had to carry him back here. He was in a similar state.”

“Just one problem,” Cid interjects. “Sora’s got them magic clothes; he yammered to me about it when he was visiting. Cloud doesn’t.” He looks to Aerith, brow furrowed, toothpick jutting directly upward from his lip. “Does he?”

“No,” Aerith concedes, “but he does have that wing. If that’s not a sign of a transformation, I don’t know what is. It’s just his body. Not his clothes.”

“Or his heart,” Leon says quietly.

The room falls silent again; even Merlin pauses. It was undeniable that Cloud had changed after he returned from the Coliseum — once a shy, bashful, determined young boy, Cloud had returned to Hollow Bastion hard and aloof, forced to grow up too quickly a world away from everything he had ever known. When he learned Sephiroth had followed him to Hollow Bastion, he had grown inconsolable, moving about with the fury of a man on a warpath no one fully understood. To all his friends, he was frustrating, unreachable, and ambivalent to everything but his goal.

Aerith draws a deep breath and clasps her hands together. “Well, that’s more of an answer than I had,” she says, attempting to keep her voice light. Leon’s empathetic look tells her she is not doing a great job. “If the darkness in his heart is causing transformations, his body is likely trying to repel it.”

“But he doesn’t have enough light to fight back,” Leon continues, realization sparking in his eyes. “So what do we do?”

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” Aerith smiles. “We lend him ours.”

* * *

While sleep holds Cloud hostage, it comes fleetingly to Aerith. She finds herself in her garden just before dawn and busies herself with the mundane, honest, simple tasks that come with maintaining the flowers. She checks rigorously for weeds, fertilizes the bushes, waters and waters and waters. She picks the flowers and diligently trims the thorns off the roses, then begins to sort them into bouquets. 

The entire garden is picked by the time the sun rises, and Aerith has run out of tasks to keep her hands and mind from dwelling. Two baskets are filled with the bouquets, tied loosely with twine from her gardening supplies. She wrangles all the vessels that could be used as vases in her home and brings them carefully into Cloud’s sickroom, holding them tightly to keep from clanking. She sets them upon the dresser next to the other two wilting bouquets, and struggles to find the space to fit all the flowers. Carefully, she sorts them by color, and begins to start combining the smaller bunches of flowers in the larger cases. 

“Don’t you think you’re going overboard?”

Aerith starts and turns; Cloud, still on his back under the covers, watches her with one sleepy, half-opened eye. She sets down the bouquet in her hands, her sigh equal parts chagrin and relief.

“Yes. My headless garden would agree. I needed something to keep me busy, since a certain patient of mine doesn’t.”

“Hmph,” is his only response. They speak in jest, and when Cloud gives her a sour look, she can see the playful tug at the corner of his mouth. She indulges him a smile and a laugh.

“Feeling better, I take it?” she asks. Cloud sits up and watches her carefully, through heavy-lidded eyes, the way a cat pretends to be paying less attention than they truly are. It seems he feels her unease as clearly as she does.

“I do,” he answers, and sounds it. His voice has some strength in it. “Do you know what’s caused all...this?

Cloud gestures vaguely to the room. The sick bed, the flowers, the wing that makes even Cloud’s shadow feel foreign. Daintily and deliberately, Aerith sits on the edge of the bed and smoothes the skirt of her dress down. 

“The answer won’t surprise you.”

He narrows his eyes. “Try me.”

“We think its the darkness. Not just affecting your thoughts and dreams, but your body — which is trying to reject it, and instead shutting down.”

Cloud’s eyes suddenly unfocus. He looks down to his hands, folded in his lap over the blanket. “Oh. Well. That makes sense.”

Aerith takes his hands, which startles him. He flinches instinctively — but he finds himself, and his arms relax as she meets his eyes.

“Cloud,” she says mildly, voice half a whisper, “I think it’s time you tell me about the wing. About Sephiroth.”

Cloud inhales swiftly as though the words pain him. He closes his eyes, then looks to the window behind Aerith's head. “Can we at least move to the porch?”

To Aerith's relief, Cloud does not need her help getting up from the bed. He wraps a blanket around his bare chest and moves slowly, careful to mind his balance, as they slip out the back door to Aerith's balcony. The day is overcast, just shortly after dawn, and the new sunlight is silver on their skin. Cloud leans gratefully against the back of the bench.

“So. Sephiroth.”

“Yes,” Aerith agrees, “Sephiroth.”

Cloud stares straight ahead, his eyes on the blur of light on the horizon that would become the sun. In a small voice, he begins his tale. “I saw him in my nightmares at the Coliseum. I would see the night Hollow Bastion fell, but he would be there standing in the flames. I…” He hesitates, takes a deep breath, then plunges on, “I had dreams he killed you. Killed all our friends. I hated him.”

Cloud pauses and glances at her from the corner of his eyes. His voice is rough from disuse and wavers just slightly, but it is clear he had practiced these words in his head. He wets his lips and continues softly, “And then he came to me in person. We fought, and he told me he could grant me power. I don't care about power and never have. But when I fought in the Coliseum against a tough opponent, I would catch a second wind just when I needed it, and the wing would appear. 

“I knew it was the darkness. I knew it was Sephiroth's influence. And I used it anyway.”

“Cloud,” Aerith says gently, “It’s okay.”

“Is it?” he asks, biting off the words with bitterness, suddenly tense. In the next instant, he deflates and sighs with the weariness of a man beyond his years. “Sephiroth isn’t my Heartless. I don't know _what_ he is, but I know _who_ he is. He is my darkness as a person, and he haunts me. I thought I would never be free.”

“You thought?”

“I thought,” he confirms. He closes his eyes and continues, “We fought this time, worse than it’s ever been before. Tifa and Sora lent me their light, but Sephiroth has always been stronger than me. So he won, or at least came close enough that I thought he did. It felt like death. But…”

“But?” Aerith does her best to keep the fear from her voice. “What was different this time?”

“It’s stupid.”

“I promise, I've dealt with a lot of stupidity over the years. This is not stupid, Cloud.”

“I thought of you,” he says abruptly. His words have lost their careful, measured meter; these stumble from his lips as though he cannot say them as fast and as sure as he wants. “I thought of you waiting for me, always waiting to catch me when I fuck up. I couldn't make you wait more.”

Aerith is stunned into silence. Perhaps all those times she could feel Cloud deep in her heart, he was just as aware of her presence. Could he have known her worry all those long years in the Coliseum and felt helpless to return to her? Before she can come up with a response, Cloud laughs softly to himself and runs a hand through his rumpled hair.

“So I pulled through. But I came back with a memento: the wing. A reminder that there’s a part of me that will always be wrong.”

“Can I see it?” Aerith asks immediately. Cloud pales.

“I—”

“Just for a moment, please,” she amends patiently. “And not as a healer — as someone who cares about you.”

He watches her carefully, and she can practically see the argument he has with himself. Cloud has always hated being vulnerable, and hides it the same way a wolf hides an injury. If he pretended it wasn’t there, if he made himself small and unobtrusive and unavailable, no one could hurt him more. After a long moment, he turns, shedding the blanket around his shoulders and exposing his skin and wing to her. He sits up straight, and she can see the nervous tension in his back and shoulders, scars pulled taut against the muscle.

He is vulnerable and open. Aerith feels a surge of pride she knows would just embarrass him if she spoke it aloud, so she says nothing. And she reaches a hand out to inspect the wing.

It is warm from the blanket like the rest of his skin. The bones beneath the muscle are delicately structured, and move smoothly when Cloud extends the wing to its full width. The membrane between its fingers is semitranluscent and tinted a faint purple. There is something odd about the edges of the wing, the way it physically takes up space — it is almost fuzzy, blurred like the edges of a poor photograph. For something so foreign, it has a strange beauty to it.

They have been sitting in silence, both of them holding their breath as she examines the appendage. Aerith interrupts the quiet with reluctance. “What I think,” she says softly, “is that you’ve been fighting nonstop for over a decade, ever since Radiant Garden fell. The wing comes to help you fight when you feel you cannot win. You don’t feel like you’re out of danger yet, not while you know Sephiroth still lives in your heart. And the rest of your body is fighting against it.”

“So what do I do?” Cloud croaks.

She drapes the blanket back over his shoulders and allows him to wrap it back around himself, hiding the wing again. “Nothing,” she says simply, and smiles when he gives her a bewildered look. “Live in the light, Cloud. Think of the wing as a scar — it’s a part of you, and it will vanish over time.”

Cloud leans back again, and Aerith does not miss how he shifts just so his arm brushes her shoulder.

“There is darkness in us all,” she continues, “but it doesn’t need to control you. Let us help. Let me lend you my light. Let your friends lend you theirs.”

She takes his hand, lifts it to her lips to kiss the ribbon of scar across his knuckles, then settles their joined hands between them. The sun breaks a crack through the cloud cover, late to its own rising.

Cloud lifts his face to the dawn. “You’re magical. Just like that, I feel...lighter.”

Aerith beams, and lets those words sink in. “You’re welcome,” she says at length, her words floating with the lilt of a joke. Cloud shakes his head, but she just catches a glance of his shadow of a smile before he stands.

“Let’s go in,” he suggests. “Thanks, Aerith.”

“Of course. Need anymore rest?”

“Ugh.” Cloud grimaces. “I think I’ve slept enough for a lifetime, thanks.”

She can’t help it; she laughs out loud, and it carries like bells through the borough. “Message received,” she says with a grin. “You can help me make breakfast, then.”

“Sure.”

They squeeze into Aerith’s tiny kitchen and cook casually, both half-dressed, chatting without the weight of the world hanging over them. Aerith steals looks at Cloud as she moves about; his wing hangs over him like a ghost as he fries eggs, but he is at ease. She knows the wing will disappear in time.

He is safe, and he will heal.

**Author's Note:**

> i've always loved the HBRC, and i think KH presents us with really interesting versions of cloud and aerith. i love them with all my heart.
> 
> please excuse the nonsense i had to make up to explain sephiroth and the wing; filling in the gaps of canon that they left open is only harder in KH.
> 
> thank you for reading! <3


End file.
